More distractification abounded today(02/05/17) when Labour Home Secretary Diane Abbott mixed up hundreds of thousands with millions on LBC radio today in relation to police funding. She said £300,000, she meant £300,000,000. Yep, that’s a gaffe and she did sound flustered and not very competent.

She has not tried to deny the error, but makes the point it was her 7th interview that day- she also asks us to look at the real ‘crime’ here, in this case the slashing of funds for the police.

I’d go one step further and look at all the main gaffes (and this is not all of them) that the Conservatives have done, firstly in the past week, and then TODAY (02/05/17.)

Plus the biggest scandal of them all!

One that most main outlets are ignoring to sl*g off Abbott.

Intrigued? Read on…

How is this worse than Fallon sayingwe’d bomb anywhere with nukes first, after lying about a misfire of one of them, or Boris saying we’d bomb Syria without a vote if TRUMP asked us to and not forgetting the mugwump backfire? (see the election blog.)

Or May telling us to beware of tourism, or saying rape and deciding whether to keep any child from that rape was a CHOICE in Parliament, or her total brush off of nurses on Marr. (Again, see the election blog.) Or her painful Kim Jong-un style ‘interview’with Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, as lampooned in the Daily Record? Or today (02/05/17), from where she banned reporters and people again, but this time not even any FILMING was allowed at her election event in a Conservative stronghold in Cornwall? Again, lampooned by Cornwall Live…

Or Liam Foxlying about a Tweet when it was four foot high on the screen behind him?

Or Jeremy Huntand Paul Nuttall RUNNING AWAY from reporters at their own press conferences. (Even the Daily Mail picked up on that one!)

Or UKIP announcing that they’d enforce GENITAL SEARCHES of Muslim girls, through schools, in case they’d had FGM done to them (see election blog).
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So yeah, why not hold the front page with this instead.

Of course it doesn’t help that many are always squawking ‘but how much will it COST’ every time Labour unveil a policy, as she made that aspect of Labour look weak.

But even the BBC has said where the money’s coming from-to be paid for by reversing Conservative plans in the 2016 Budget for capital gains tax cuts. The Labour Press Office also said this when the policy was released yesterday (01/05/17).

So not her finest hour but nowhere near as bad as what some of the top Conservatives and far right have done this past two weeks.

Theresa May claiming they’d win ALL 58 Labour seats that voted B*exit, when some of those majorities are pretty much insurmountable? (Telegraph ran with this today).

That many voters all over the net are playing slogan bingo with May’s robotic (as Marr called it, and even the Express covered this) election performance? (see pic)

The high court decision that Conservative measures to combat air pollution wereso s**t that they were ILLEGAL? And they’ve been told by the Court in their ruling that immediate publication is essential and rejects Defra’s plea to delay until after the general election.

The pressure mounting even in the MSM for May to admit that she called the election to mask the electoral fraud? (Something the Independent are running with…)

Or indeed the announced unmasking to happen today (02/05/17) of huge dodgy dealings between the Conservatives and HSBC (when I know more, I’ll add it)… So far, this intriguing and tangled web has emerged… no wonder they’re trying to fudge and obfuscate the pollution figures…

Two years ago the Guardian brought the HSBC issue up (cue under-rug sweeping) but there seems to be a massive reveal on the cards.

Labour MP John Mann, part of the Treasury Select Committee, had this to say:

Couldn’t have anything to do with that, could it, this rush to condemn Abbott for a decimal point?

When ACTUAL money that could prove to be in excess of either figure appears to have changed hands between top Conservative and Lib Dem MPs and some of the most unpleasant big corps on the planet?

This astounding letter has just come into the public domain:

This is not a gaffe. This a Conservative-level gaffe. LARGE SCALE FRAUD.

According to the MP in the letter, Roger Mullin, SNP MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, calls this his last letter as current MP and promises to continue to fight against #ToryDirtyMoney, as it’s being called on Twitter.

Sadly the Electoral Commission’s response today (03/05/17) is not satisfactory, but much of that is not their fault. As they say- it’s LEGAL by the letter of the law to do this.

Tony Blair brought in new rules about donations from non UK donors (see the Electoral Commission’s letter noting they were UK based donations)- The Political Parties, Elections and Referendum Act came into force in February 2001, that forced ALL donations of over £5000 to be declared and banning all non UK donations.

As far back as 2006 concerns were raised over donations to the Conservatives and their correlation between that and relaxing planning permissions on the Green Belt, just for one example, in 2011.

Labour have always been pretty transparent on such things, for example: there was no secret about how much trade unions paid to the Labour Party, which has published annual accounts since 1900, (upon which the Conservatives tried to make political capital due to their drive to reduce the power of the trade unions) but the Conservative Party did not publish accounts until the 1980s.

Labour’s reliance on corporate money is slim indeed but the position relating to the Conservative Party is very different. They rely on corporate backing. And in return they offer benefits such as: for a donation of £10,000 it would be possible to join the Renaissance Forum, “the most prestigious of our donor clubs.” This would enable the donor to “meet face to face, prominent decision makers, opinion formers, leading members of the Conservative front-bench and senior Party officials at small and exclusive dinners”. Backhanders, anyone?

So we can see that reform is still needed in this area, for this is the Conservatives taking advantage of a LOOPHOLE. Legal but NOT ethical. This is the Electoral Commission own stance on it- the only one they can make under the current law.

The Independent yesterday (01/02/17) showed clearly that the Conservatives have failed to deliver the promised £4 BILLION savings after cutting disability benefit. No wonder Labour want to reverse this legislation should they win the general election.

The Office for Budget Responsibility says forecasts initially predicted £13.6bn would be spent on disability benefits in 2018-2019 but now this figure is now thought to be £18bn.

yesterday (16/05/17) on BBC news, their Economics EditorKamal Ahmed‏ made an error of 10.4 magnitude when he was describing what the tax increases as proposed in the Labour manifesto would mean for those earning over £80,000- look at the graphic. It clearly says a £23,000 LOSS OF INCOME when the extra tax would cost £2200 per year on top of what they already pay (c £21,000). He gets away with putting a retraction on the 10 o’clock news (too late by then, it’s gone round the MSM like wildfire) and a half hearted acknowledgement on Twitter.

also today, Amber Rudd, the Conservative former Home Secretary (if we compare exact jobs and context with Abbott) in and election broadcast overestimated the average wage of a policeman by over £28 THOUSAND per officer. Again, the MSM thus far have been completely silent on this. This is an almost exactly equivalent error as Abbott’s if you multiply that by the amount of police cut by the Conservatives even since 2009 (20,000). She would think those officers earned £800 MILLION, when if fact they’d have earned £560 MILLION- an overestimate of £240 MILLION. And this was not on the radio, this was actually at the Police Federation conference! They’re all out of work, those 20,000, anyway so it’s sort of moot, but I am sure you get the point at which I am driving here. No wonder they jeered at her.

So, I’ll leave it to you to think about why Abbott’s blunder is REALLYfront page news.